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Call it Siri fooled by vandals on Wikipedia. If you ask Siri, a virtual assistant inside the Apple iPhone, iPad and Mac, "what is an Indian", the answer that comes from the "smart" assistant might offend you. And for right reasons. Siri in its reply says that "they are a little brown and they smell like curry and they eat it".

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Update: Siri's weird answer to term Indian was due to vandalism on Wikipedia and Apple seems to have made additional changes to its virtual assistant to ensure that it doesn't pick up incorrect Wikipedia answers anymore. Now, if you ask Siri "what is an Indian" it is giving an appropriate and regular answer.

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Smart assistant, did you say? This is a rather dumb answer, or some sick joke played by a college student. For its answer, Siri says that the source is Wikipedia. But then it is also an answer that some college kid somewhere found funny and decided to put up on the Internet, from where Siri picked it up.

The interesting bit here is that although Siri is at fault here, and its answer is making Indians on the web rather furious, it is accurate in saying that its source for this "brown and curry" definition is Wikipedia. A Buzzfeed report mentions that what Siri is doing here is that it is pulling the definition from Wikipedia. However, instead of pulling it from the live page, which is there right now, it is pulling in information from a Wikipedia edit made on that page on June 8, 2017. On that day someone had put in the information that Siri is using on the Indian page of Wikipedia. Although the changes were quickly rolled back -- this is how Wikipedia works -- for some reason Siri is still using the cached version of the page for its definition.

For Apple, the incident is not only embarrassing but also shows the challenge it faces in making its virtual assistant more useful and accurate. For a lot of Siri answers, the company relies on third-party sources like Wikipedia and the data that these sources have is not always accurate.

Google, which too has its virtual assistant called Google Assistant, is somewhat ahead in the "smart" game. Not only the Google Assistant understands the accent of users better, it also has access to far more data compared to Siri, which helps it provide better information to users. For example, in this instance when asked "what is an Indian", here is the information Google Assistant provides:

Also Read: Our Wi-Fi at Indian railway stations is better than San Francisco, London Wi-Fi: Google

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Vandalism on Wikipedia made Apple Siri give racist Indian answer - India Today